Margin in Missouri is thin, indicates a nationwide split

In all but one presidential general election in the past century...

In all but one presidential general election in the past century, Missourians have chosen the candidate who won the presidency. But the state’s value as a compass of the nation’s political mood extends beyond general elections because its population’s make-up (rich and poor, urban and rural, agricultural and industrial) tends to look like a microcosm of the country.

That compass on Wednesday seemed to be indicating, quite powerfully, that Americans remain starkly divided about who the nominees for president, both Democratic and Republican, should be.

“What you see really is a dead heat here, and as Missouri goes, so goes the nation,” said Kenneth Warren, a political scientist at St. Louis University, reflecting on the results of the state’s primaries on Tuesday.

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Contributing to the deadlock — and also pointing to a broader national phenomenon likely to play out in other primary states and in the general election in November — was the large number of independent voters who cast ballots on Tuesday.

Some 35 per cent of voters in Missouri say they have no particular party loyalty, and the state allows voters to pick either party’s primary ballot. On Tuesday, many more people voted in the Democratic Party race (823,754 ballots were counted) than in the Republican’s (589,173).

One-third of the Democratic primary voters described themselves as independents, according to exit polls, and they said they voted overwhelmingly for Senator Barack Obama.

Among Democrats, the state’s delegates will be divided between Mr. Obama, who won the state with 49.2 percent of the vote, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton with 48 percent. In a state where 1.4 million votes were cast, the space between the two — some 10,400 votes, according to unofficial results — was so painfully close that a few news media outlets called the race in Clinton’s favour on Tuesday night, only to withdraw the announcement as the night wore on.

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On the Republican side, all of Missouri’s delegates will go to Senator John McCain, under Republican Party rules, but the popular vote looked more like a pie split nearly in thirds.

McCain, who won 33 per cent of the state’s Republicans, finished about 8,500 votes in front of Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, who wound up with 31.5 per cent. Not far behind was Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, with 29.3 per cent.

Huckabee won a wide swath of less populated counties across a large southern section of the state, generally a socially conservative region, while Romney won a number of counties, including some around Kansas City.

McCain’s victory came from no region in particular, but from a wide strip of first-place finishes in counties between Kansas City and St Louis; it did not hurt that he came in second behind Huckabee in many of the southern, most conservative counties.

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Republican voters in Missouri were split over what they saw as the most important issue facing the country, statewide exit polls conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the National Election Pool showed; 44 per cent said the economy was most important, followed by the war in Iraq (20 per cent), illegal immigration (18 per cent) and terrorism (13 per cent).

Republicans who shared certain top concerns also seemed to share preferred candidates. Many who chose illegal immigration said they voted for Romney, while those who chose the war voted for McCain.

Although Republican leaders in Missouri dismissed worries, some spoke of a lingering divide.